All posts in Web dev

Yahoo Mail

I never cared much for web mails. I like to keep my mail in offline reader and have used web mails only for online forums and similar activities prone to spamming.

By pure accident – Flickr asking to re-sign with Yahoo login – I opened an email account on Yahoo Mail. I already have GMail account and thought for few seconds do I really need it. One why the hell not moment later I checked in and…

Yahoo! Mail interface

…was really pleasantly surprised. The interface of the new (still beta) mail is very nice, with wonderful color scheme and very colorful yahooish icons. And it’s quick. It works and acts just like any email client. It has a 1-click switch to plain text mode (I hate writing HTML emails and little less hate to receive them). Heavy use of remote scripting and keyboard shortcuts. Quick and painless draft saving. When message is later saved, you need to manually delete the draft. Uses UTF-8 – cyrillic and serbian latin letters are preserved wonderfully in subject and the body.

Bad sides: annoyingly often asks for password, whenever you switch between Yahoo apps. On each message send you need to enter even more annoying CAPTCHA test. It’s really unfortunate because these are things you encounter often and they ruin the otherwise fantastic experience.

What good 404 page can do

Bounce rate halfed in two days

I added related posts to my 404 page along with improved detection of incoming URLs on Saturday evening.

Insert HTML page into another HTML page

…or what to use instead of iframe in XHTML Strict pages.

I have added some kayak.com ads the other night, to the archive pages related to traveling. These ads are actually full-featured search snippets that allows you to directly search kayak.com database. Very handy things.

Sadly, they are written the old-fashion way, with quirks mode in mind, and worse yet – they are writing nested table tag soup directly into the page – no iframe thingie, like Google AdSense is doing. Thus, when my CSS files got applied to it, the snippet fell apart.
Luckily, the snippet always opens a new window, thus I quickly coded in an iframe in which the snippet is displayed. Which was all dandy…apart from the fact that my pages are XHTML 1.0 Strict, in which iframe is banned element. Jolly.

Correct way to include another HTML page into another is by object. The element which only purpose is to insert any foreign object into nice and structured web page. Continue Reading →

Google Analytics

Hot on the hills of AWStats, I have added Google Analytics tracking code to each page on this site. With small hiccup – I added it to blog pages only, by mistake. Realized four days later. Dumb

Although Dejan told me all the good stuff about it, I did not bother to try it out until few days ago. Server-side log analysis is still needed since my feeds can’t be tracked with GA code. For other pages though, the amount of tracking options GA gives is amazing. There are some very interesting things I picked up there.

Geo-map overlay

One of the best visual goodies is this geo-map overlay display. It’s one thing to look at the list of countries from where people are coming, quite another to see it so nicely displayed. I actually hovered over each of those dots to take a look and smiled all the way.
Continue Reading →

AWStats log analysis

DreamHost, where all my sites are located, offer Analog log analyzer as your window into visits demography. Analog is not bad, but it has horrible user interface and it seems it is not developed anymore.

A much better alternative is AWStats, which is not only free, but actively developed too. I have installed the 6.5, latest stable version and for now only have the last 24h data. Interesting stuff, nonetheless :)
Continue Reading →